Book excerpt: A gripping chronicle of the ferocious twenty-year struggle between the English monarch and the feudal lords of Ireland, The Twilight Lords describes the first authentic colonial venture in English history, a venture that held captive a whole generation of the best that Ireland and England could muster. By the time the last and the greatest of the "rebels" surrendered, Elizabeth was dead, two waves of English settlers had been exterminated, and the southern part of Ireland had become a barren wilderness.